Greg,
I too got frustrated trying to get IPSEC to work in 5.6. It worked fine in 5.1.2, but I gave up on 5.6. Im glad I did. Below is a posting I did earlier tonight in this forum. You might look at these options.
Paste:
OpenVPN sounds interesting. I am going to read up on this. Another simple and extremely cheap option is the linksys BEFVP41 firewall vpn router ($129.00 at compusa). These devices can handle up to 70 IPSEC tunnels and are SIMPLE to configure.
The linksys is a simple device that is easy to configure. For my primary location, I prefer a true linux server firewall with a secure DMZ. I have IPCop linux as my central site firewall vpn router. IPCop is every easy and quick to install. Amazingly, you can use the linksys BEFVP41 firewall vpn router as an IPSEC endpoint to IPCop. For me, this is perfect as the linksys is dirt cheap and has no moving parts so it should be reliable for those remote (don't want to travel there) locations. SME is also used as a primary gateway to filter web traffic with squidguard, watch it with sarg, and filter spam before passing email to exchange. This setup works well and is very cost effective.
Now to learn about OpenVPN....
ryan